We (my company – for the rest of the story will be known as we) recently upgraded to PeopleTools 8.51.10 – our application level is 9.0. We are a PeopleSoft HRMS shop, and use PeopleSoft Portal for our self-service customers.

So, shortly after our tools upgrade a corporate decision was made to upgrade our browser to IE 9. Our usual in-house computer has MS Windows 7 (soon to be upgraded to SP1) with the browser standardized as Internet Explorer – currently version 8.

While we had been using PS Portal for a while the presentation was getting – well – dated is a nice way of putting it. Our portal got amped up – a lot. So when we took a look at our freshly delivered portal in IE 9 we noticed white space in areas that decidedly should not be white.

In essence bands of white space were being rendered in the header. Not always tho, only when a user was clicking thru to a lower level of navigation.

Oracle admits there is a bug # 13087401: IN IE9- WHITE SPACE IS APPEARING ABOVE THE PEOPLESOFT HEADER ON EACH PAGE.

White spaces appear in IE9 only – which seems to be caused by the tags (or dir=”ltr” in general) within the HTML. These are found throughout PeopleTools.

Unfortunately – Oracle plans a final fix in Tools 8.53 – and there is no plan on back porting to earlier versions.

So, noticing that the white spaces only appeared some of the time I started looking into the code. I found that we had an HTML template that was not used at the top most page level – but was fired once a user started drilling down. The template started with a boilerplate declaration:

The html root level element in the template had a dir attribute. It seems that when PeopleTools renders a page using a template, and the template has a dir attribute in the html root level element – that gets used when span tags are generated. So in our case span tags were getting generated as …. In an IE 9 browser that line would get rendered as a white space.

My solution was simple – since this was only happening in the page header, I removed the dir attribute. The second line now reads: <html lang=”%LanguageISO”>. When the page gets rendered by PeopleTools the span tags no longer had a dir attribute; and white space was no longer being created in IE 9.

I would guess that in those situations where you needed the dir attribute then the next step would be to try inline formatting – but for now I’m not in that situation.